Stanford Medicine Cancer Institute - Human Immune Monitoring Center Shared Resource

Stanford University Human Immune Monitoring Center Shared Resource provides state-of-the-art assays that measure biomarkers relevant to the immune system or specific pathogens.

Examples of biomarkers that are specifically relevant to cancer include changes in lymphocyte signaling pathways, serum cytokines, and specific immune responses that target tumor cells. This resource offers Cancer Center members specialized assays that monitor the effects and efficacy of immunotherapies and vaccination strategies that are becoming increasingly important alternatives to conventional forms of cancer treatment. In addition, pathogens have been implicated in the etiology of many cancers, and the HIMC offers array methodologies for pathogen identification.

The HIMC initiated operations in early 2007, and has already attracted many faculty users in the past two years; about 74% of the current users are Cancer Center members. We expect an increasing demand for our services as new projects in the immune modulation of cancer are developed.

Major services provided by the HIMC are Luminex bead-based assays for measuring cytokines, FACS phenotyping and phosphoflow analysis for cell characterization, and the Firefly nanofluidics assay method for detecting phosphorylated proteins.

Future goals of the HIMC are to introduce for general use the multiplex peptide-MHC tetramer technology recently developed by the Davis lab to quantitate and characterize T cell responses to tumor associated antigens and the complementary ELISPOT analysis, which quantitates T and B cell responses. The shared resource will also offer full bioinformatics consulting and data management for its users.